Mr Frugii maestro John Marshall shares ice-cream making secrets

Ever wanted to make ice cream like John Marshall? The brains behind Canberra's homegrown Mr Frugii brand will host an ice cream making workshop at the Canberra Environment Centre this weekend. He'll share base recipes for the home chef, using ingredients out of the pantry, and give advice on how to produce a perfect, creamy mix. And you'll get a taste of the Frugii magic yourself at the end of the workshop ("there's no point talking about bloody ice cream and not having any," he says). But if you can't make it to the class, Marshall shares five quick tips.

1) Do you have an ice-cream machine?

First of all, it depends on what machine you've got and whether you've got a machine at all. If you haven't got a machine I'd actually make a parfait. And that will be a really nice sort of "ice cream" that works. For anything more you'll need a machine.

2) Keep things cold

This is just common sense. If you've got a machine, if it's one of those little baby ones where you take the inner bowl out and freeze it, then you start off with your custard or your base ice cream recipe as cold as possible. You don't pour hot stuff into one of those frozen rings. Even if you've got a proper refrigerated unit, you start off with a chilled base at 4C and you only put half the amount in and the machine churns it up really nice.

3) Clean out your freezer well in advance

An hour or two before you start making ice cream, make sure you've got enough space in your freezer for a wettish mixture that might still have a bit of heat in it. You should be able to open the door, put it in, shut the door with minimum temperature loss. You can put stuff in the freezer and it might not be any colder than the outside if you've had the door open. It's a bit like the blast chiller on MasterChef, you see people running up to it when there's a competition and the door's open half the time - it will only be -8C and the normal freezer runs at -18C. The ice cream when it comes out… is at its most fragile state and it's at that point you want to finish the job pretty nicely and get it continuing to drop down in temperature. You don't want it raising the temperature and then dropping because then it will lose its air that you've just whipped into it.

4) Keep the flavours simple

Stick to the simple ones to start with, understanding what's going on and then get complex. Use two flavours, maybe three. People typically get the flavourings wrong and they under flavour things. Say you made a strawberry flavouring, you've got it perfect and you taste it and it's beautiful. If you've got a decent amount of air into your ice cream, you've actually just increased the volume of the ice cream and therefore stretched the flavour you've put in. So the strawberry could be 20 per cent thinner and your tongue's going to be cold so in theory you might have lost 30 per cent of the "flavour". When I was a judge at the Royal Dairy Show we'd some ice creams with six or seven flavours. And you've got no chance - you've always got one that edges the others out. Don't get too complex. Start with fruit in your ice cream, a bit of vanilla or tonka bean. I like herbs, such as rosemary and peppermint. But be careful of particularly subtle fruit such as coconut or chestnut.

5) Be precise with alcohol

If you put 20g of alcohol into your ice cream, it's equivalent to about seven times that of sugar so you have to remove that amount of sugar from the base recipe. But it's more complicated than that - you can't just go, "Okay, well seven times 20 is 140 so I'll remove 140g of sugar from the recipe and then I'm fine." It contains other properties as well which cause it to start breaking down. So then you have to start eating it really quickly and putting less sugar in and winging it. Or you have to start using different types of sugars which is way beyond a home chef. You can do it, just be very careful with the alcohol. You can say seven to one ratio of sugar, remove that sugar from your base recipe but be very precise with your alcohol, don't just free pour. You'll have a beautiful [alcoholic] thickshake, but it won't be good ice cream.

Making Ice Cream with Mr Frugii is on Saturday June 6. $80. See ecoaction.com.au.